Just Desserts

by Barbara Bretton

  “Is he an actor?” Lizzie asked, fingers poised on the keyboard.

  “Tommy Stiles and the After Life,” Hayley said.

  Finn could hear the “d’oh!” in her voice.

  “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Finn offered.

  Lizzie shrugged her fourteen-year-old shoulders again.

  “Mucho multiplatinum, multigold,” Anton volunteered.

  Click-click-click. Pause. Click-click-click.

  “The old guy with the highlights!” Lizzie crowed. “I thought he was dead.”

  The bakery kitchen erupted into loud groans.

  “Don’t look at me,” Hayley protested, waving her hands in the air. “Her father loved disco.”

  He couldn’t remember the last time he heard Anton laugh so loud or so long. “The child needs to sit down and listen to what rock is supposed to sound like. Tommy is one of the greats.”

  “‘Break Me,’” Finn said, listing Tommy’s greatest hits. “‘Your Place or Heaven,’ ‘Fear of Falling’—”

  “‘Fire Fight’!” Hayley and Anton said simultaneously, then slapped plastic-wrapped hands in the air over the carrot cake.

  Lizzie rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay!” she said in good-natured defeat. “I get it. He’s super-amazing and everyone but me knows it. That’s cool.”

  I like this kid, Finn thought as the printer churned out a copy of the proposal. She was smart, funny, easygoing, so much like her grandfather Tommy that it almost made the puzzles of DNA clear to him. Until a few minutes ago, Lizzie Goldstein hadn’t known Tommy Stiles existed. She had no frame of reference she could use to model herself after him. She was her own self and that self was a smaller, feminine version of the grandfather she had never met.

  He locked eyes across the room with Anton. The drummer saw it too, which meant Finn would have to do some explaining on the long drive back out to Long Island. He couldn’t deny what was right there in front of them. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  “It’s our standard form,” Lizzie was saying as she pushed the legal-sized page toward him. “Basic stuff about deposits, cancellation penalties, payment options.”

  “Great,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”

  “I mean, I know you’re a lawyer and everything, but I do a thorough job. You won’t find anything.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I take a look.” The kid had self-confidence, that much was certain.

  He scanned the paragraphs, ran the numbers in his head, then reread the entire thing slowly, word for word.

  “You were right,” he said. “This is textbook-perfect stuff. I know paralegals who couldn’t get it this right.”

  She beamed at the praise. “Thanks. I told you it was good.”

  “Except for one thing.”

  “But I’m sure—”

  He crossed out a price quote and replaced it with another, higher one.

  She took a close look at his change. “You raised the price!? Nobody raises the price!”

  “I offered your mother extra for short notice when we were negotiating.”

  “She didn’t tell me that.”

  She maintained eye contact like a first-class litigator pleading her case in front of the Supremes.

  “She forgot,” he said, “but I didn’t.”

  “Are you going to sign?” she asked, unable to mask the excitement in her voice. “I mean, like now? Tonight?”

  “I’m going to sign.”

  “You don’t have to take it back for the famous guy to countersign?”

  “I can sign for him.”

  She looked like a kid who still believed in Santa Claus and he felt like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Would she still look that happy when she found out Tommy was her grandfather and this whole thing had been nothing more than a convenient way to check them all out before breaking the news?

  “Yo!” Anton bellowed. “We need a drum roll here.” He started pounding out a rolling beat on the marble slab he had been working on.

  Lizzie leaped to her feet. “Let me see!” The mini-mogul morphed back into a skinny fourteen-year-old right before Finn’s eyes.

  Hayley looked triumphant. Her smile was wide and, Finn suddenly realized, every bit as lopsided as her father’s. Except she didn’t know that. She didn’t know half the things he knew, half the things she would find out as this whole story unfolded.

  There was a guarded quality to her that Lizzie didn’t share. He had only done a basic LexisNexis search, but he had seen enough about her ex-husband to understand why she had erected fences around herself and the ones she loved.

  There were no fences around Tommy’s heart. The only reason he cared about protecting his assets was for the sake of his children. Guarding his heart was something he had never learned to do.

  In a perfect world, they would meet and the bond would spring to life between them in the space of a heartbeat. Tommy would open his arms to his long-lost daughter and she would fall into them, no questions asked.

  A father-and-child reunion that would erase thirty-eight years of questions?

  Not a chance in hell.

  What was going on? Finn Rafferty wouldn’t stop looking at her.

  She wouldn’t have known that except for the fact that she kept looking over at him and getting caught. She had tried to conceal it by pretending she was keeping an eye on her daughter but the man had radar.

  He probably had a few questions and she didn’t blame him. Asking a fourteen-year-old to negotiate the deal for you was probably not the way things were done out there in tony East Hampton.

  South Jersey must seem like another planet to him.

  Which, following that line of thought, made her an alien.

  That would explain a lot.

  “So what do you think?” she asked when he finally joined them at the work bench. “This is a basic design, per the client’s request, but I’ll use some of the same techniques on the drum set for your party next week.”

  “Looks good.”

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  “It looks very good.”

  Even Anton groaned.

  If she had been in his shoes, she would have been watching the process every step of the way, hanging on every shingle and shutter. Now that the deal was all but signed, he acted like the finished product was irrelevant.

  “C’mon, man.” Anton sounded exasperated. “Open your eyes. This is a work of art.”

  “Anton set the windows in place,” she explained as Rafferty deigned to take a closer look. “We use finely spun sugar baked in the oven for the panes of glass.”

  Nothing.

  Not even a grunt.

  Anton, beaming like a proud father, pointed out various details that seemed to float right over his boss’s head. Or was he Anton’s boss? They seemed more like friends. The whole relationship was muddled to her.

  Trish had been right when she said Anton was a rock star. He was the After Life’s drummer, a position he’d held for the past fourteen years. Before joining up with Tommy Stiles, he had played backup for a veritable Who’s Who of rock royalty. He was currently separated from his first and only wife and living in a guesthouse on Tommy’s Long Island property. To hear him tell it, Stiles was a combination of Rod Stewart and Mother Teresa, a generous, warm-hearted free spirit who would give you the Versace off his back if you needed it.

  “Nobody’s that perfect,” she had said as she carefully urged the sugar paste deck into position at the back of the carrot cake house. “Tell me he pulls the wings off flies or likes to lie around in his Jockeys eating pork rinds and watching NASCAR.”

  “He does like NASCAR,” Anton had admitted, laughing, “but, believe it or not, he’s one of the good guys.”

  She didn’t believe it. You didn’t get to be that famous for that long by being a good guy. Her ex-husband wasn’t even famous and he hadn’t managed to make it out of his twenties with his good-guy credentials intact.

  Not that it was any of her business. She
was decorating a cake for the man, not marrying him. Although if she remembered her celebrity gossip correctly, Stiles was a big fan of marriage and had an army of ex-wives and lovers and children scattered on two continents to prove it.

  Classic male menopause, she thought. The aging stud who started up a new young family every time he felt his testosterone level getting lower. Not exactly her idea of a great role model.

  A man like that spent his twenties and thirties building a career, making a name for himself, forgetting the fact that he had a wife and children back home who made his freedom possible. Sooner or later the marriage (or marriages) broke up, and our hero found himself a new woman, and next thing you knew he had himself a new wife and a new family and a full-color spread in People filled with quotes like “I love being a dad” and “You bet I change diapers.”

  Again, not that it was any of her business. It was just that she knew Trish and Rachel were standing with their ears to the door, hanging on every word, and she wanted to be the voice of reason designed to bring them back down to earth.

  Preferably with a thud hard enough to shake some sense into their pretty heads.

  They needed to know women could conduct business with a gorgeous (okay, so he wasn’t just easy on the eyes, he was downright eye candy) man and not succumb to simpering, eyelash-batting flirtation.

  “Any comments, complaints, suggestions?” she prodded Rafferty after he had finished examining the cake house like it was the space shuttle after a flight. “Your boss is going to be paying serious money. You might as well get exactly what you’re looking for.”

  “I’m looking for a drum set,” Rafferty said, too sharply for her taste. “Bass, snare—that’s what we agreed on.”

  “We haven’t signed anything yet, Mr. Rafferty. If you want to find yourself another baker, that’s fine with me.”

  “Mom!” Lizzie sounded like she was choking on one of her Linzer tortes.

  “Quiet, Elizabeth,” she said over her shoulder then swung back around on Rafferty. “All day long I’ve had the feeling something was going to go wrong and maybe this is the something I’ve been waiting for. I’m sorry but this whole thing feels weird to me. You’re going to be throwing a party in a major Atlantic City hotel. I’ve been to events at those hotels. I know what they can do. You can’t tell me that one of their pastry chefs couldn’t whip up something big and gorgeous for you on a moment’s notice.”

  He looked genuinely surprised, which, if she hadn’t been so annoyed, would have made her laugh out loud. “You’re telling me you don’t want the job?”

  “I want the job more than I want my right kidney, but I still don’t get why Tommy Stiles’s lawyer drove all the way down to Lakeside, New Jersey, to buy a cake. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “You’re so making a mistake,” Lizzie said in a stage whisper.

  Rafferty glanced quickly at her daughter and the look of respect in his eyes shifted something inside Hayley. Every time she thought she had him pegged, he threw her a curve. She’d taken a big chance, letting him work out the contract details with Lizzie. Not too many hotshot attorneys would have sat down with her kid, much less treated her with kindness and without condescension.

  So why the sudden loss of enthusiasm? She had a lot of experience with men who blew hot and cold with their affections. For most of the years of her marriage she had accepted the shifting floor beneath her feet as part of the bargain she had made when she married Michael.

  Well, she wasn’t married any longer. She didn’t have to accept anything from any man. Especially not from a stranger.

  “Listen,” she said as the image of herself on Entertainment Tonight faded away, “you were real enthusiastic about my work until you saw this cake and now you can barely spit out two complete sentences. If you don’t like what you see, then say so. I promise you I’m not going to impale myself on a cake server if you don’t like it.”

  “Mom!” Lizzie sounded like she wanted to lock her in a soundproofed closet and throw away the key. “What are you doing?”

  “Your mom’s right, Lizzie,” Finn Rafferty said. “I’ve been acting like a horse’s ass and I’m sorry.”

  “I never said you were acting like a horse’s ass. I said you were—” She stopped. Maybe horse’s ass was the best description after all.

  “I like the real estate agents’ cake,” Rafferty said.

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” Anton said, a wicked gleam in his dark eyes. “I noticed that too, Hayley.”

  “It’s a great cake,” Finn said. “A cake among cakes. A cake that will live long in the memory of everyone lucky enough to see it.”

  “Not funny,” Anton said.

  “He’s right,” Hayley agreed. “Not funny at all.”

  “I like the cake. I didn’t think you could pull it off but you did. You’ll probably do a great job on the after-party. Your daughter drew up a perfect contract. The sun is shining. The birds are singing. I still have all of my hair. If I’m missing something, I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

  She stood there, pen poised, and still didn’t sign. What was her problem? All she had to do was bake a cake, not hand over the keys to the bakery. If the goddesses of sugar, flour, and pure creamery butter didn’t rain blessings (and contracts) down on her head after the party in Atlantic City, her world wouldn’t come to an end. But something continued to hold her back.

  “I’ve been on the payroll almost fifteen years, if that’s what’s worrying you,” Anton offered. “They haven’t bounced a check yet.”

  Bless the bald-headed drummer for breaking the tension. The laughter came as a welcome relief.

  “You’re right,” Rafferty said to Lizzie. “She is a worrier.”

  “Told you,” Lizzie said. “She even worries about Katie Couric’s ratings.”

  “Elizabeth!” she said through the new burst of laughter. “I explained that to you last week. I’m not worried about her ratings, I’m just…concerned.”

  “You worry about news anchors?” Rafferty asked.

  “Worry is good,” Anton said, still laughing. “When it comes to his kids, even Tommy’s a worrier.”

  She pointed toward Rafferty. “What was that look?”

  “What look?”

  “You shot Anton a look when he said, ‘even Tommy’s a worrier.’ What’s that about?”

  “Yeah,” said Anton, “what’s up with that?”

  “Remember that confidentiality agreement you signed last year? Personal observations are off-limits.”

  “Too late,” Anton said cheerfully. “I already spilled everything I know.”

  “He’s joking,” Hayley said, amused by the look of intense horror on the attorney’s handsome face. “I tried to get him to spill everything he knows but he refused.”

  “I owe you,” Anton stage-whispered as he mopped his brow with the back of his hand.

  Rafferty laughed with them but the uneasy look in his eyes lingered. Something was definitely off. She didn’t know what it was exactly but her instincts were rarely wrong and she couldn’t let go.

  He wore an Armani suit, but once upon a time he had also worn an earring. The faint dot left from the piercing caught and held her attention. There was definitely more here than she knew.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I’m not a glass-half-full kind of woman. My glass isn’t just half empty, it has a hairline crack and it’s about to shatter. This whole thing seems too good to be true and it probably is, and I wish I could figure out exactly what’s bothering me about it but I can’t, so maybe you could help me out here.”

  They were all staring at her like she had lost her mind.

  “Too much information,” she said. “I always do that. I get started talking and I can’t stop.”

  Lizzie groaned and buried her face in her hands.

  “This is like winning the lottery, Mom,” her daughter pleaded. “Who cares why they picked you? They picked you! Work it!”r />
  “You have a recommendation from the governors of two states,” Rafferty said. “Unless you’ve been passing off Entenmann’s as your own, you’re damn good and you’re the one we want for the job.”

  “You’re right. I’m a culinary genius, the Van Gogh of baked goods, who would be decorating cakes for Charles and Camilla if I didn’t live in New Jersey.”

  They continued to stare at her.

  “That was a joke,” she said. “Yes, it’s true but I meant it as a joke.”

  “Don’t make jokes, Mom,” Lizzie said from behind her hands. “I’m begging you! Just sign the contract, pleeeeease!”

  She looked at Finn Rafferty. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if he went the Entenmann’s route after all. “I’ll sign it if you will.”

  To her amazement, he reached for a pen.

  Despite her misgivings, her heart leaped with excitement. He was actually willing to go the distance.

  “We’re leaving in five,” she said to Lizzie. “Tell Rachel and Trish they can go home. We’ll close up. Don’t dawdle!”

  Lizzie was out of there in a flash.

  Anton, whose cell phone had been beeping, stepped outside.

  Rafferty signed both copies of the contract, then pushed them toward her.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “Well, at least I’ll be able to pay next month’s mortgage without hitting the credit cards,” she said, quickly scanning the contract. “Fifty percent deposit, payable within forty-eight hours. That’s a good thing.”

  “Lizzie gave me the account number. It will be deposited in the morning and you should have access to it by the end of the business day.” He was watching her closely. Maybe a little too closely, as if he saw the same shadows gathering overhead that she saw.

  “Would you tell me if I was right?” she asked as she signed her name twice. “Would you tell me if there was more going on here than baking a cake for a rock star?”

  “No,” he said, “but I wouldn’t tell you that you were wrong.”

  5

  “Are you going to tell me what the hell was going on in there?” Anton asked Finn fifteen minutes later as they headed toward the highway.